FundyNutter

So…in case you were wondering my big food crime was too bowls of coco crispies with whole milk before dinner time. A huge calorie intake and not too bright for the lactose intolerant as well.  And today?  Well, does it count as a diet no no if you had a coupon? Because I had some really good burger king coupons today.

But in good news, because it is not all disappointment, I am tracking myself and learning what my habits are which is a great step towords hanging them.

It’s taken seven years, but I finally came up with a dinner so atrocious I really am ashamed to be using the energy resources to cook it. It smells bad, it looks funny. I can’t actually imagine eating it in the next twenty minutes.

It started out innocently enough. I have leftover turkey. And, um, cabbage. And some sausage in the freezer. I got to thinking how a nice smokey polish sausage would be tasty mixed with some leftover turkey. But what to do with it? The cabbage suggested kraut burgers to me. So…

I mixed the dough, I chopped the cabbage. I pulled the sausage out of the freezer. My gaze fell to the label. Italian sausage. Shoot. I knew immediately it would taste terrible with cabbage and turkey. But the dough was already rising. And maybe…? Well, no. I chopped the turkey and the sausage way too fine so it had a disgusting similarity to dog food. I browned the sausage and added the cabbage. The fumes filled the kitchen. It made my stomach turn. I thought perhaps it would taste better than it smelled. It didn’t.

So what did I do? I rolled out the dough, filled it with, well, sludge, and added some cheddar cheese. It wasn’t my first mistake, but I know in my heart it won’t help.

The cabbage/sausage/turkey combo had a bit of a Chinese food taste too it, had I been bold I could have added sesame oil and a little hoisin sauce and maybe salvaged it. But that doesn’t go with yeasty rolls, now does it? So I added cheddar cheese. Because while cheddar cheese doesn’t go with Chinese food it does go with yeasty bread rolls.

Like I said, my stomach turns thinking about eating this and my head aches at the thought of even trying to feed it to my kids. I have a bit of sahm guilt also–this is the best I could do for my poor beleaguerd husband who spent the day embalming and soothing sad people? Really? Barf Rolls? Well, now you are in on it too. Just try to enjoy the delicious and healthy food you are eating right now while thinking the words “Barf Rolls.”

I’ve inherited my Grandma’s recipe box.  It’s a great colection, some more thatn 40 years old, some still written on napkins, and some in a shorthand language even grandma would be hard pressed to decifer. Some are just a list of ingredients with curious titles like “Husbands Delight” attached to them.

I thought I’d scour the batch for the best of the bunch–the best being the most culturally incomprehesible, of course.  I wonder if my grandma ever made these choice bits, but…could be.

What we have here is my suggestion for your next holiday dinner party. Lay the table, put out all five hundred forks and light up your scentless 12 inch tapers in the middle. This is a feast with actual courses. In fact, you might see if Jeeves would come out of retirement and serve for you. That extra touch of class would be worth it.

First course: The Soup

Jellied Borscht.  (Yumm-o!)

1 cup shoe string beets (reserve liquid)

3 pk unlflavored gelatin

1 cube beef boulian

2 c red cabbage

Chives, lime juice, salt, 1/2 cup sour cream, parsley

Add water to beet liquid, 2 cups, heat. add gelatin, boullion-cook add remaining ingredients. Pour into 9 x 13 dish, mix sour cream and parsley, fold in. set firm. serve on lettuce.

Second Course: Main Dish

Chinese Beef Tonge Pot Roast

3 lb beef tongue

1/4 cup soy sacue

1 T sherry

1 clove garlic, minced

2 t sugar

1 t salt

1/4 t dried tarragon, crushed

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

6 medium potatoes, pared and halved

2 T cornstarch

2 t minced gren onion.

Do you really want to knw what you do with all of that? Well…if you insist.

In pressure saucepan, combine tongue and water. Cook at 15 pounds pressure for 30 minutes.  Drain and peel tongue.  Combine the stuff that tastes good and pour it on the peeled tongue.  Marinate 1/2 hour, turning once.  In large saucepan combine tongue, marinade and 2 & 3/4 cups water.  Cover and simmer 1 hour and 40 minutes.  Add potatoes. Simmer 15 minutes more.  Remove tongue and potatoes, add the rest of the stuff.  Cook and stir till bubbly.  Serve gravy and half of the tongue sliced and the potatoes.  (I assume you freeze the rest of the tongue so you can use it for disciplining your children.  “One more saucy word out of you and I’ll serve tongue for lunch!!”)

on the side serve: Pickled Green Beans

1 lb green beans, rinsed in water

1 c distilled white vinegar

1 T salt

2 bay leaves

1/2 t crushed dried red hot chilles

2 t each of fenneel seed and mustard seed

pull strings and all that rot from the beans.  In a ten inch frying pan bring two quarts of water to a boil.  Cook beans till bright green but still crisp (about three minutes.) Drain and immerse at once in cold water to arrest cooking.  Drain again.  Lay two pint jars on their sides. Lay half the beans, parallel in each jar. trim ends to fit jars. Set jars upright.

Add the other stuff together and get it real hot.  Pour it into the jars, you know how , with a funnel or what have you.  Put the lids on them and listen for the happy popping sound that says they are good to go. Chill overnight or up to a month.

So you have your tongue, potatoes and greens, but you still need something to drink. And by that I mean, to get down jellied borscht, pickled greens and tongue, you probably need liquid fortification of the very fortifying sort.  Which would explain all of the drinks recipes in the old box of grandma’s.  Here’s two I recommend for this festive event:

GALIANO

4 cups sugar

4 cups water

heat and mix, let cool

1/5 100 proof vodka

2 t vanilla

5 t anise (liquid)

4 drops yellow food coloring

ready in about a week, when the liquid clings to the glass.

and something for the ladies…

Open House Punch

One fifth Southern Comfort

3 quarts 7 up

6 oz fresh lemon juice

one 6 oz can frozen orange juice

one 6 oz can frozen lemonade

chill everything. Mix in punchbowl. Drink until you don’t realize you have to peel a tongue

Finally we’ve come to desesrt. You’ve been waiting I know. And you’ve earned it.

Oregon Whear Growers Leauge: Oregon hazelnut Prune Cake

It’s got a bunch of stuff in it, such as sugar, buttermilk, prunes and all that rot, what.  So then you mix it up like a cake and frost it with chocolate. Or you forget everything I’ve posted so far (except the drinks and the frosting) order a couple dozen pizzas and call it good.

But, you know, Pizza isn’t very festive, so I offer you as a final option, this fine recipe called “Christmas Beef”

20 # beef.  (upper round of beef with bone removed, tied)

Rub thoroughly with 4 oz of salt petre. (anyone else want to burst into song when they hear Salt Petre?) Be generous with the salt petre (Salt Petre!!–oh come on, its Abbigail Adams, circa 1776, you know you want to join in the song) and do not use less than 20# of beef.

Let Lie for 24 hours.

Rub thoroughly with the following mixture: 2 cups salt, 2 T cloves, 1 c brown sugar, 1 t mace, 2 T black Pepper

Place in deep pan (crock or enamel) in cool place, cover lightly.  Turn everyday for three weeks.  To cook: rinse beef well with water. Place beef in roaster with 1 c bacon drippings on top and 1 cup cold water in the pan.  Cover and bake four hours at 350 degrees. To be eaten cold, thinly sliced, while singing educational and patriotic show tunes.

They offer a fine dessert of Ritz torte to accompany this (because who needs vegatbles when you have salt petre?)

Beat three egg whites until foamy. Gradually add 1/2 t baking powder and 1 cup sugar. Beat until stiff. Fold in 14 ritz crakers, crumbled pea size and 3/4 cup chopped nuts.  Bake in a 9 x 12″ pan and 350 degrees for 30 minutes. coll top with whipped cream and marischino cherries. Cut into squares and serve.

Salud!

Apparantly I didn’t.

Our house was a good buy.  Decent location, not super small by my standards.  And with a nice big yard that  I don’t seem to go in much these days.

And I don’t go in it much because of the trouble I’ve caused inside.

Our house was once a miniscule ranch.  A previous owner had a few dollars and some sense and built an addition. So now it is an L shaped ranch. We have been fighting the tacky factor inherent in that design with nice paint and well planted landscape.  I’ve tried to distract viewers from the addition roof line with tasteful design.  Currently our curb appeal rates “satisfactory” with me. It will move up to “highly satisfactory” when we get the board and batten shutters up.

The addition also created an awkward traffic flow inside the house.  We agreed when we bought it that it would be easy to fix and well worth the effort.

So the original house plan had three bedrooms at one end of the house, with the “Master” (the bedroom with a 3/4 size closet instead of a 1/2 size closet) on the back yard side.  The addition is a new master off of the original master bedroom.  The new room has patio access, full bath, double closet with an organization system built in,  and a nice little nook I turned into a sewing space.  Now, “Master suite” is the technical term for this room, but Daniel and I moved into one of the tiny spaces with half pint closets. The girls sleep in the other small room and the big suite is now a cozy family/tv room.

The akward space –the previous master bedroom is currently a den.  The family that added the addition just stuck the addition on and left the other bedroom a closed up bedroom-like space that you passs through to get to the real bedroom.

In our world of open concept homes this weird closed off space had to go. Or change.

We have one of those hall bathrooms in the front of the house with a kind of long hall in front of it.  You know the kind, it T’s into the regular hall and has a coat closet.  It’s a handy closet.

The wall that makes up this bath/hallway space is also the wall that makes up the corner of the passthrough den.

It has been my plan since we moved in to knock that hall wall and the adjacent doorway out to open up the den.  It would make the flow of traffic more comfortable. It would bring the sunlight from the south facing window in the den into the hallway and it would make our house seem more intentional.

The layout of hte house would then be: Walk into the front room, you are also facing the dining room and kitchen.  Turn right, walk down the hall way. First door on the Right, small bedroom. First door on the left, hall bathroom.  Door at the end of the hall, small bedroom.  Comfy, open space with southfacing window is the den. Second door on the left, Master bedroom.

So, I took the matter into my own hands. That is to say, I took the splitting maul into my own hands and began knocking the dry wall off of it.  I have to say, the sunlight into the hall is all I hoped it would be.

Daniel urgently requested I talk to a professional before I knock the studs out, just to see if they were load bearing.

It’s funny, I swore they werent’ for good reasons. My mother in law swore they were.  It turns out she was right.  But by a fluke.  We have a tressle roof that supports its own weight. For half of the house. And then tha bedroom half is supported by the walls. I guess, just because they wallls were going to be there anyway, the builders figured, “why not?”

I’ve got my sunlight now. But I’m still waiting to hear back from the respected professionals about how much the new support beam is going to cost us.  I know their labor is $90 an hour for two men.  They said they wanted to price the beam and get back to me. They said they could do the job Tuesday. They didnt’ have any problem just putting the beam in and then letting Daniel and I do all of the finish work.

Do you think it could take more than two hours to do the job?  I’m scared it would be more than a three hour job.  Really scared. I plan on using my October babysitting money to pay for it, and that would cover a three hour job if the beam isnt’ too much money. And yes,  that is the same pay check I was going to use to buy the dishwasher.  And some new blue jeans. And socks for all the girls that live in the house.

It felt so good knocking the drywall down and pulling away the first of the nonessential 2×4’s.  (fun note, they are from 1960, so they acutally are 2×4! Daniel laughed and said they just looked so big!) It felt so good that I am trying to be happy I started the project. However, if the fix-it men quote the job at half a day or something like that I will have to live with the studs for a little while.

It can’t hurt, Daniel would say. After all, I have plenty of practice living with a big stud.

I’ve actually liked a number of things about being a hand dishwasher. I liked being in the select group of four women I know without dishwashers. I liked being one of the few women I am acquainted with who “choose” to be dishwasher free.  Some women choose it more willingly than I do, but there it is. I like the hot steamy water on a cold morning, or a cold whenever. I like the feeling of accomplishment when the job is done. I like how it always seems to be done much quicker than I expected. I like the way I feel like as long as there was indoor running water, a water heater, and inexpensive soap with undiluted surfactants i could totally rough it in the third world, or at least in a neighborhood really near the third world.

I wash the dishes fast.   I could beat my husband at a hand dishwashing race any day of the week.  That, more than anything else, has been carrying me along my almost year long journey without a dishwasher.  (oh boy, a whole year! aren’t I something.)

There was such a pile of dishes to be washed on Saturday and I was very bored with the whole idea of hot tubs of soapy water.  I got out the wrachet and tore about the machine.  I dug hairy gunk out of the trap. I bleached months of grime and mildew out of the drains. I jimmied the latch so it would run with the door open.

I didn’t fix anything. But I learned that it is a dead dead machine. The spinny part doesn’t spin. The fountainy part gurgles dismally.  The gunk I pulled out? Nothing more than tantalizing evidence of the massive gobs on the other side of the non-removable screen.

I was this close to running to the appliance store and throwing in the towel. The only thing that stopped me is the mountain of buyers remorse I have piled on over this last year.  A real McInley of regret.  I took deep breaths. I dismissed the same as cash sirens calling to me.  I made a plan.

I mean, of course, I already had a plan.  But did anyone really expect me to wait until my car was paid off to buy a new dishwasher? Really?  I hoped, but I didn’t believe.  And anyway, it’s almost half paid for.  I mean, we are really kicking the car loan’s tush.  It’ll be done in no time and the price of a new dishwasher only cuts one measly month off.  What’s one month compared to my sink slavery?

So , the new plan is as follows.  My November babysitting money goes for a November dishwasher.  I will wash up the Thanksgiving dishes in a brand new bottom of the line, clean and shiny, scratch and dent, steal of a dishwasher.

Or at least, that’s the plan.

Please don’t consider this a complaint. It is an honest query.

As I just mentioned, one way to keep a grocery bill low is to limit the convenience foods most often eaten as snacks. (It’s helpful for cutting back on calories too.) I tend to buy one package of convenient snacks on grocery day. A sort of apology to the kids for making them suffer with me at the store.  Yesterday we had the devils own Pop Tarts.

But the thing with pre-schoolers and toddlers is, they have regularly scheduled snacks. At our house snack time is during Elmo’s world and when Lucy gets up from her afternoon nap.

After about 23 days in a row of banana’s in the morning, the girls eventually protest and beg for something else.  Similarly, they hate it when I give then the lunch leftovers in the afternoon.

I don’t love doing that either. I prefer to use snack time as an opportunity to balance out their nutrition.  I like to give them oatmeal and milk for breakfast, banana for snack, quesadillas and vegtables for lunch, carrots and cookies (or other sweet treat because I love them) in the afternoon and then the classic meat, carb, veggie dinner.

I bought a copy of Better Homes and Gardens July edition. It had an article about snacks in it. It told me to give them a variety of healthy foods.  It said to look for food that had no artificial ingredients or transfatty acids. The author of the article said a great way to give your kids a burst of afternoon energy was to pair their afterschool veggie snack with…Lays Potato Chips: All Natural and with No Trans-Fats.

I think it used the brand name Lays two hundred and seven times.  I think the PR lady at Lays wrote the article.

I get the whole healthy, no transfats, no artificial ingredients no high fructose corn syrup. I make my own cookies, after all.  But have they never heard the words “empty calories” before?

Because with all of that fat fresh from the canola tree (yeah yeah, I know fresh from the seeds of the rape plant) potato chips are very high in calories and void of any nutritian.

So then.  Better Homes and Gardens was no help.

My friend Brooke sent me an awesome recipe for granola bars which I am going to make this weekend.  I think they would be a good thing to keep in the freezer for snack times.

Today the girls are parked in front of the tv with peanut butter spoons and grapes. (We are out of bananas.) But afternoon is coming quickly and I am going to have to come up with yet another snack.

Somebody help!

It needs a good tooting, and only I (or my friend Rachel) could really do it justice.

The Columbian newspaper has featured two articles in the last two weeks about living on the cheap, healthy, green and single income.

The first article was about being cheap and living on a single income. It featured a CPA who owns her own business and has a stay at home daddy.  They have two kids.  How do they manage?  Well, for starters, they sold their Californian home and moved to a very upperclass area of Vancouver where homes start around $350,000.  I give them Kudos for the big sacrifice of moving.  That is a world rocking thing to do.  However. It is people like that who created our $350,000 overpriced homes in the first place. But that is a digression.

They put 20% down because Cali homes are even more overpriced than PNW homes are. They made sacrifices like buying exercise equipment instead of keeping their gym memberships.   Woo hoo.

Enough of that family. Clearly I think that they aren’t doing anything special enough to get the front page of the Columbian.

The second article was about a mom who is my age. She has a family of four, though only her three year old daughter was mentioned.  So I am guess the other kiddo is a babe in arms.

She is a stay at home mommy.  She gardens for her summer veggie needs. She buys her groceries from local farmers. She buys grain and grinds it.  She buys milk and churns it. She bakes her own bread and spreads her own butter on it. First thought–Yumm!! I do  respect her for all of that work and how healthy it is. But remember, the article is being sold as a Cheap Living peice, with a side note of green.  The author wrote all about this mother’s great sacrifices and countercultural lifestyle choices because they were saving her so much money.

The mother in question also offered us her best piece of advice.  She said people spend too much money on groceries because they try to fix all sorts of different foods, Asian one night, Mexican the next, etc.  I too have complained about that.  Sometimes it just seems like moms are expected to know how to cook everything under the sun without the benefit of a culinary education. (Hey! No complaining!) She said the best way to counter act that kind of waste is to pick one style of food and make it over and over again.

I’ll repeat some important facts: She’s feeding two adults and one three year old.

Let’s have a drumroll for our cheap friend.

Her grand grocery total? $250 for the month.

Thassright.

This news article came on the heals of my great month of victory. I had been spending too much money on groceries. For example, one recent month saw me spend $500 on groceries.  I can’t actually afford that so Daniel and I went back to the cash system two months ago.

This month I had a great victory over my grocery bill. It made the lady in the newspaper sound like an amatuere.

For comparison, I did not grind any wheat or churn any butter–though, I do think that sounds fun and delicious.  But I did make five loaves of bread instead of buying it. And I made ten dozen cookies.  (For the Big Appreciation Event.)  I fixed chicken with Indonesian peanut sauce, burritos, spaghetti with homemade marinara, and stir fry with hoisin sauce, amongst other more American fare..  The Peanut Sauce was my favorite.

The other lady wants us to eat the same food to save lots of money. I want to get very good at making a variety of food so we won’t get bored eating at home, which would send us off to restaurants.

Important facts about us: I am feeding two adults, a girl who is turning 4 in two weeks and a two year old.

drum roll for me please.

My total grocery bill this month:

$175

The only thing is, shopping at Winco and watching the price per ounce on the tags, only buying what you need for the two weeks, keeping an empty refrigerator, not having any snack foods on hand other than carrot sticks, homemade bread, apples, and banana’s isn’t really front page news.   It ’s just living within my means.

Most of my days are made up of: Cleaning (house, garden, children), cooking, fixing, reading, going insane.  Things that seem like great big insane things to a person with such a limited scope of activity likely seem mundane to the rest of the world.

Yesterday I moved three beds, four dressers, a couch and a big tv.  I moved all of the flotsum and jetsum that accumulates under said furniture as well. Somtimes I get a bee in my bonnet and move my furniture around for aesthetics or cleaning.  This time I was rearranging my whole life.  In italics.

Our house is a ranch with addition. The addition is a huge master suite with access to the deck and huge bathroom…well, bathroom, laundry room combo. When I shut myself up in our bedroom I can feel like I live in a giant house.  I don’t. The original footprint of the house was about 1000 square feet, so all of the rooms, barring our love nest, are pretty small.

A couple of years ago I read an article in a homes magazine about a family that turned their master suite into the family room, because it was so big and comfy.  “Lunatics!” I thought.

And yet, that is what I did yesterday. My girls share a room, because they want to. So I shoved them and all their stuff into the small bedroom. Then I shoved me and all of my stuff into the medium bedroom. Then I put the tv and couch (which Daniel made and I had to unmake a little bit to get through the door) in the master bedroom.

Our den which, two decades ago, used to be the masterbedroom, is a pass-through room to the now-family room.  It has the computer and boxes of jumbled toys in it right now.

I like the new family room.  On the one hand, it is much bigger then the old den.  On the other hand, in this era of the great room, it is still sort of smallish for a family room.  I like all of the sunshine that the two big windows and the slider door give that room. It is nice to share that with the kids and the tv.

On the other hand I think I hate loosing the master bathroom.  I haven’t showered yet, but I am going to have to bring my clothes with me into the bathroom. Bah.  And, since the largest room in the house and the largest bathroom in the house are now public spaces, I will have to keep them both clean. Double Bah.

It feels counter cultural though. Like I’ve done something big and unamerican. After all, don’t we move and move and move until we finally have that magnificent home which boasts a master suite with a reading nook, a spa-like bathroom, and direct patio access? What kind of person trades all of that for a pink 12 x 9 foot rectangle with balloons on the ceiling?

I told myself I would keep it like this until the end of summer…give it a real shot. Make today’s backache from moving all of that furniture by myself worth something.

The best I can offer now though (as I anticipate the first inconvenient shower) is, “We’ll see.”

Worse than an obvious mess staring at you from the kitchen sink, taunting you, saying “Any minute now you will be tied to the sink washing this disgusting mess. You will be here until your hair turns white and your kids graduate high school. why fight it. Come to me now….”  worse than that, is the mysterious stink that sometimes makes an appearance in an otherwise clean home.

My first experience with mystery stink was at our second apartment. The apartment was a marvel of plyboard and plastic veneer. It was three years old. I didn’t vacuum often enough, but there was a dishwasher and few enough people to clean after that there should have been no room for stink.

And yet, there it was. Especially when I ran the microwave.

The mystery remained until the day I moved.  I don’t know…I think that I would prefer it still be a mystery.  At elast I had my pride still then.

The microwave was ours, and moved with us.  I pulled it out from its corner and discovered the stink. One bagged loaf of bread. I know it was bread once, because the bag said so. Inside it was a mottled green fur. The bag itself was painfully distended, swollen with the gasses of decomposition.  I presume I could smell more when I used the microwave because it heated the bag up.

There has been a mystery smell at this house recently.

In the kitchen. It took me a couple of months to pin point it.  It wasn’t the dishes, I promise. They may pile up in a day, but they are washed up with regularlity (see my tired, scruffy hands for evidence.)

The answer to this mystery stink was staring me right in the face. Everytime I went to the sink I stared right at it, but didn’t recognize it.

It was a ripe, rotten smell. When I  opened up my front door, especially on those hot days a couple of weeks ago, a sick, sweet smell wafted over to me.  The whole house, just smelled like it had gone bad.

Yes. It was the compost. Sitting in an open flower pot in the sunny kitchen window.

I keep a pot full of disgusting food in a sunny place, and couldn’t figure out where the stink was coming from?

I have hopes that I fixed it though. I replaced the charming flower pot with a big plastic Folgers bin–the one with the “aroma fresh” sealing lid.

And just so you all know, I was emptying the pot pretty frequently. It was small so it would fill up fast and require emptying. But sometimes, speed just isn’t enough.

I was chatting personal finance with a friend recently. Like so many of us, she carries a small balance on her credit card on a regular basis. I was telling her about sitting down with my bank statement and balancing my budget. Not actually balancing my checkbook, an old fashioned and quar-turned activity I haven’t done since seventh grade math class. Balancing my budget is somewhat more fun than that checkbook thing our grandparents did, and definately less precise.

My friend was really surprised by how much work I put into our family budget. With the credit card and its low, not entirely paid off balance at her convenience, she didnt’ see the need for the work I do. Her surprise prompted me to blog. Maybe what I do is uncommon enough to be interesting to my friends who pop by here.

I do my banking online. In years past I was able to download transactions to Quicken and run all sorts of reports on my spending. Lately Quicken and my bank have stopped speaking to each other. Something about Quicken not being able to tell the bank what the name of my first pet was everytime I log in.

Nonetheless, the years of Quicken use have built spending catagories into my brain. These catagories translate to my paper budget.

I write my paper budget at the beginning of the month (every month since March 2003.) The italicized words are the catagory heads, written on their own line. Each word in that catagory gets its own line on my notebook paper, with a colon and a dollar amount next to it. I generally leave three spaces between each catagory in case something comes up that I forgot. I catagorise like this:

Priorities: Tithe, Charity, Life insurance Daniel, Life Insurance Traci, Retirement Daniel, Retirement Traci, College Fund, Christmas Fund.

Home: Mortgage (includes taxes and insurance), electric, phone, internet, water, trash

Auto: Payment, Insurance, Gas (maintanence comes out of monthly misc.)

Other: Groceries, Misc., Entertainment

Irregular monthly expenses also go under Other, these would be things like doctor bills that come in, saving up for the deck, etc.

The part that really surprised my friend, is once, or twice a month, I review my actual spending against the amounts in the written budget. I go to my credit union’s personal banking page and print out my check registry. When my banking was Quicken based (that ended last year) I would just run the report and it would show my my catagories. This new, low tech way takes a little more time. I look at each item, catagorize it, write it on another notebook page, and add things up.

As a college kid with few expenses and as an untrained newly wed, I just spent money in a bewlidered fashion and hoped for the best.

Now that I am a lean, mean SAHM machine controlling the money is my favorite brain activity. That guy I mention sometimes, Dave Ramsey, says we should tell every dollar where to go before it reaches our hot little hands. He also says we need to write our budget every month. It is really difficult to come up with a once-for-your-lifetime style budget. Needs change over time, income changes as well. To do a “budget” that tells you where to put your money for the rest of your life puts the money in control. Rewriting and reviewing each month keeps you in control.

Now, just a tid-bit more information than is necessary, I am not a very in-control person. Things easily get away from me, so retirement and college savings are paid automatically. It’s not the largest sum ever put away, but it goes there without fail each month. For me, at least, that money needs to be in control of itself before it becomes more profit fpr Target.

That’s all. Fairly simply stuff. But it keeps our family afloat. It keeps me able to stay at home and it keeps Daniel able to do the work he loves rather than hunting down a bigger paycheck.